Faculty Accomplishments

Jane Moss, former Robert E. Diamond Professor of Women’s Studies and Professor of French, was named a member of the Order des Francophones d’Amérique by the Conseil Supérieur de la Langue Française. At a ceremony in Québec City, Moss was honored for her work in “literary studies in Québec and Canada. She has published over a hundred articles...

Elizabeth Leonard, the John J. and Cornelia V. Gibson Professor of History, has been offered a contract for her book, tentatively titled Once a Slaveholder, Once a Slave in Civil War Era Holt’s Bottom, Kentucky. The book examines a community of free whites (centering on the birth family of Abraham Lincoln’s judge advocate general Joseph Holt) and enslaved blacks (a...

Professor of Psychology Martha Arterberry had her paper “Integration of Thought and Action: Arm Weights Facilitate Search Accuracy in 24-Month-Old Children” published in Infancy Sept. 7. The paper reports findings from two studies addressing perception and action in 24-month-old children conducted during Arterberry’s sabbatical in 2014-15 in collaboration with Susan Hespos at Northwestern University and Rachel...

Associate Professor of Psychology Christopher Soto presented a talk titled “Measuring the Big Five in Little Kids: Developmental Trends in the properties off youth self-reports and parent-reports on the Big Five Inventory-2” at the 2017 meeting of the Association for Research in Personality June 9. The talk reported on research that showed the “Big Five...

Associate Professor of Psychology Melissa Glenn and Medical Director Paul Berkner were among the authors of a paper titled “New method to induce mild traumatic brain injury in rodents produces differential outcomes in female and male Sprague Dawley rats,” which appears in the October issue of the Journal of Neuroscience Methods. Peter Wirth ’16 was the...

Professor of Art Véronique Plesch published an essay titled “On Appropriations,” a revised version of the keynote address she delivered June 1, 2016, at the International Word and Image Conference: Crossing Borders—Appropriations and Collaborations (organized by the College of the Holy Cross, the Université Paris-Diderot, and the Université de Bourgogne, Dijon). The essay appears in a special issue...

The Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society in Munich published Charles A. Dana Professor of Science, Technology, and Society James R. Fleming’s paper “Excuse Us, While We Fix the Sky: WEIRD Supermen and Climate Engineering” in Men and Nature: Hegemonic Masculinities and Environmental Change, edited by Sherilyn MacGregor and Nicole Seymour, RCC Perspectives: Transformations in Environment and Society,...

Adrian Blevins, associate professor of English, added an essay to her series in Vox Populi. Titled “My Problem with Rules,” Blevins lyrically explains why she opposes rules. “My problem with the rules is that they too often throw common sense out the window. My problem with the rules is that they can sometimes subvert justice. They just...

Assistant Professor of Geology Bess Koffman published two papers in August. Koffman and University of Maine coauthors wrote “Integrating Scientific Argumentation to Improve Undergraduate Writing and Learning in a Global Environmental Change Course” which appeared in the August issue of Journal of Geoscience Education. The paper describes the authors’ approach for incorporating scientific argumentation into a global...

A paper cowritten by Assistant Professor of Biology David R. Angelini, Biology Laboratory Technician Serena M. Graham, Assistant Professor of Biology Ronald F. Peck, Alexandru M. Pleşa ’17, and Emily L. Shaw ’19 was accepted by the Journal of Bacteriology and will be featured on the cover of the September issue. Titled “Opsin-mediated inhibition of bacterioruberin synthesis...

In a Seattle Times op-ed titled “North Korea is nuclear: Live with it, and help it feel less cornered,” Associate Professor of Government Walter Hatch writes that “the regime in Pyongyang is actually quite rational and is driven toward one simple goal: survival.” Instead of war games and economic sanctions, “Washington could help Pyongyang feel less...

Associate Professor of Philosophy Lydia Moland wrote an op-ed in the Aug. 19 Boston Globe titled “The North’s racial blindness.” Based on her recent research on American abolitionist Lydia Maria Child, Moland writes that “Child was the first to publicly diagnose what might be called ‘Boston Blindness’ — an affliction not confined to the city, to be sure,...

Professor of Art Véronique Plesch delivered a keynote address titled “Copies: the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly” at “La reproduction des images et des textes,” 11e colloque international de l’IAWIS/AIERTI, Université de Lausanne, Switzerland, July 10–14. In her lecture, Plesch considered the remarkably heterogeneous and unstable way in which copies and the practice of copying have been...

Professor of Art Véronique Plesch concluded her third term as president of the International Association of Word and Image Studies. At the association’s triennial conference in July in Lausanne, Switzerland, Plesch stepped down from the position she has fulfilled since 2008. She will continue serving on the association’s advisory board. Founded in July 1987, the International...

A research publication by Britt Halvorson, faculty fellow in anthropology, is included in a new book of essays, The Request and the Gift in Religious and Humanitarian Endeavors (Pp. 65-92, Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). Halvorson’s chapter is titled ” When God Is a Moral Accountant: Dilemmas and Requests of Accountability in U.S. Medical Relief in Madagascar” and “examines how...

Clara C. Piper Associate Professor of English Tilar Mazzeo spoke with Robin Young on WBUR’s Here & Now in a piece titled “Returning ‘Once More to the Lake’ Through Literature.” Mazzeo mentions Colby several times, in reference to its proximity to Maine’s lake district, the Belgrade Lakes, and about her teaching E.B. White’s essay “Once More to...

Marsden Hartley’s Maine (Yale University Press, 2017), a book that accompanies the museum exhibit by the same name, was the topic of a podcast on New Books Network. Coauthor Elizabeth Finch, Lunder Curator of American Art, conducted a podcast interview July 28 with Kirstin L. Ellsworth and the other coauthors. Listen here.

An essay by Charles A. Dana Professor of Philosophy Jill Gordon was published in Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal. In her essay “Black Bodies Matter: A Reading of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me” Gordon argues the book “provides an anti-idealist argument that violence against the Black body is the cause of, not merely the effect of, various racial...